Today my daughter showed me a humorous meme which said that one must be 18 to vote and 21 to buy liquor, but then it showed a ouija board and said that at 8 you can talk with demons for low price of $14.99. (If you’re not familiar, the Ouija board has the letters and numbers printed on it, as well as “yes” and “no” and sometimes other things, and participants use a planchette with their hands on it that moves over the letters and is supposedly used for communicating with the spirits of the dead.) The meme is funny as a joke, of course, but it does bring up the curious subject that people who object to ouija boards being a means of (accidentally) talking with demons usually object to them for the wrong reasons.

In my experience, at least, the people who object to Ouija boards usually object as if they are magical items that allow a person to talk to demons in a way that they couldn’t without the board. They’re never explicit, but it’s as if they think the demon would say to the person who is open to talking with them, “True, I am a spirit of much greater intelligence than you who, because I hate God and his creation, wishes to lead you to misery and destruction, but you’re only trying to talk to me without a planchette, so I will say nothing to you.”

The problem with Ouija boards is not that it is a special device which has the power to attract demons or give them any special access to a person. If you take the idea of demons seriously even slightly, they’re always around and trying to talk to us, often by things like stirring up feelings or suggesting memories to us at inopportune times.

The problem with Ouija boards is that the human being is listening.